Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King

"Content is King" -- no longer. Today, the world has changed.
"Curation Is King."

Ok, I hear all the content-makers sharpening their knives to take
me on.

I'm ready.

First, why content is dead:

Content used to be the high quality media that came out of the
very pointed end of the funnel. Articles in the New York Times.
Movies from Miramax. Thursday night comedy from NBC. Books
published by Simon and Schuster. Creative folks wrote pitches,
treatments, sample chapters, pilots, but only the best of the
best got published.

Then, the web came along and blew that up. Kaboom! Now content
has gone from being scarce to being ubiquitous. Bloggers make
content. Flickr photographers make content. Facebook posts are
content. Tumblr publishers make content. Content isn't King
because it isn't scarce. It's everywhere, it's overwhelming, and
it's gone from quality to noise.

Which isn't to say that this is a bad thing -- it's actually very
very good. It's freedom. It's public discourse. It's new
communities that were previously silenced by their inability to
access broadcast distribution outlets now getting to have their
chance in the spotlight.

As someone said to me a few weeks back: "Andy Warhol was wrong.
We're not going to be famous for 15 minutes. We're each going to
be famous for 15 People." Indeed.

So let's look at the relative explosion in content and why this
trend is only going to continue to grow massively:

Devices: Everything makes media now. Cell
phones, laptops, digital cameras, iPads, web cams, as well as
location aware software like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and a
zillion others. The combination of where we are, what we like,
what we're doing and what we're saying all creates micro-media.
Content is being exuded out of our digital pores.

Bandwidth: 3G is here, 4G is around the corner.
Wifi is slowly but surely being pushed out and shared, though
it's currently strangled by passwords and firewalls. But just
watching the 'check in' phenomena of Foursquare is a clue about
how quickly content creation is becoming an everyday part of what
we do.

Sociology: People like sharing. They like
sharing bite size info about what they're doing, where they are,
who they're with, what they're buying. They massive influx of
consumer created crowd content shifts content from scarcity to
abundance, and then to an overwhelming fire-hose of
undifferentiated data.

So, what institutions does this 'Content Tsunami' put under
pressure?

Publishing: In a world where everyone makes
content, publishing is no longer able to lay claim to being the
'best' maker of quality content in their field. In fact, content
creation is costly and painful though this may be, may not result
in measurably better content than content curation. Mixing
creation and curation is essential for survival. Check out
Huffington Post for a mix of created, curated, and crowd-sourced
content.

Experts: It used to be that there were a handful
of folks who where thought of as experts in their field. So the
folks who owned the publishing platforms got to determine who was
an 'expert' and build their brand. Now, that's upside-down.
Social media superstars are able to create visibility though
leadership and personal brand value with ubiquity of voice. The
new Expert is the leader with the most twitter followers, not the
person on the speed-dial from CNN.

Advertising: We're standing at the end of an
era. "Mass Media", the ability to reach large segments of the
population with a single message is essentially over. For
advertisers, the need to find content in context, and to have
that context be appropriate for their message and their brand is
critical. So, Curation replaces Creation as the coin of the realm
for advertiser-safe environments. No longer can advertisers
simply default to big destination sites. The audience is too
diffuse and the need to filter and organize quality crowd-created
content is too critical.

Search: Search was a critical solution to
bringing audience to the web. But today the vectors that you can
"search" on don't reflect what audiences need to know to find
what matters to them. Search provides the name, date, and other
algorithmically chosen variables. But what makes an article right
for Huffington Post, but wrong for News Max? The voice of the
content and the context, which require human curation and crowd
collaboration.

We've arrived in a world where everyone is a content creator. And
quality content is determined by context. Finding, Sorting,
Endorsing, Sharing - it's the beginning of a new chapter. And not
since Gutenberg have we seen such a significant change in who's
able to use the tools of content creation to engage in a public
dialog.

The emergence of a new King -- a Curation King, reflects the rise
of the new Aggregation Economy. It is an exciting time to be in
content, and the best is yet to come.

Steve Rosenbaum is founder and CEO ofMagnify.net, a NYC-based Web video
startup. He has been building and growing consumer-content
businesses since 1992. He was the creator and Executive Producer
of MTV UNfiltered, a series that was the first commercial
application of user-generated video in commercial TV.